Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Engineer bails out student in jail

neil.fraser.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 202 posts

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#131

Post by forensic »

philwelch wrote: post #63
nostrademons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those crimes are drug crimes, which are only a crime because we've chosen to make them so. It's not all that hard to change a law to make a certain group of people whose habits you dislike criminals.

There are definitely elements of this involved; I just challenge the idea that this is the whole story. If you're comparing the US to a country where drugs are legal, of course the US crime and incarceration rates are going to be higher on account of that fact. That's not the comparison being offered, though.

You don't realize how lax drug sentences are in other countries.

In canada, people caught with kilos of coke get house arrest.

There was a guy caught with 500kg of MDMA in his backyard kitchen and he got house arrest.

People don't go to jail for drug crimes - they usually get community service or house arrest.

Certainly for possession NO ONE goes to jail in Canada, but I've read that in the US people with a gram of weed have been sent to jail. WTF?

Or for that matter, two hits of crack, and you get like 10 years or something ridiculous.

In canada it's almost impossible to actually serve jailtime for a possession charge, and even trafficking charges are often not met with incarceration but rather conditions.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#132

Post by smokinn »

mixmax wrote: post #24

25% of the world population in jail is American. 737 out of 100.000 Americans are in jail, that's almost one out of a hundred. As a comparison Denmark has 59 out of 100.000 people in jail. And the number of Americans in jail has been rising steadily for the last 20 years. This is a pretty serious problem.

This clip from the british TV show IQ goes into those kinds of numbers. It's staggering. Especially for black men.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7wgFcCefE

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#133

Post by jchrisa »

philwelch wrote: post #73
barrkel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes your argument circular: you suggest that the US has higher criminality and this justifies the larger prison population; but faced with statistics that show it's not particularly higher, you now suggest the criminality would be higher if the prison population were lower. In other words, the prison population is large because there are more criminal actors; and there are more criminal actors, because there i…

It's easy to make it look like that when you ignore leading and lagging indicators. Someone might be in prison today because of a crime they committed in 1990. Obviously, their being in prison has nothing to do with the 2010 crime rate and a little bit to do with the 1990 crime rate. In 1990, the US did have higher criminality! My point, though, was that it's not a controlled experiment to compare the US and the Neth…

I'd suggest that our living arrangement (get isolated from community, earn and spend money to purchase a simulacrum of what community used to provide) has a lot to do with the bleakness of American life, and bleakness is probably a bigger predictor of criminality than anything else. If you want to fix the US, go back 60 years and fight highway and auto subsidies.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#134

Post by icegreentea »

neilk wrote: post #98
philwelch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be accusing me of racism rather than offering a counterargument. Did I misread you? Cultural homogeneity and its effects on crime transcend race. European immigration to the US during the 19th and 20th centuries were linked to crime as well. Usually, the dominant cultures in a heterogenous society will exclude and oppress minority populations, which leads to poverty and desperation. The problem really is…

That link seems suspect to me. India is rife with crime. Daily life , even for rich people, involves lots of activities that would be crimes in a Western country, particularly official corruption. Anyway, you spoke in terms of "criminality in some American cultures", which sounds like a euphemism, since you neglected to name them. Although you followed it up with your hetereogenity thesis I (like many readers) was al…

As a counterpoint (Canadian.. living in Toronto). There is a good chunk of people growing up (my age... university age) that just assumes every city with a significant non-white population will have some region where the poor of the non-white people end up shooting at each other. Toronto has/had these areas (Jane and Finch ring a bell?). Vancouver has these areas. Montreal does too. It's no where as bad as the crime rates you'll see in other North American cities (well, except Vancouver...), but that's the feel.

Also... if you leave Toronto/Vancouver/Montreal (and few other big urban centers), there actually is a very strong tradition of Canadian being a white christian.

You're painting everyone with overly broad stereotypical brushes. Nothing makes a Canadian look as lame as possible as going out trashing talking Americans armed with stereotypes and stuff they remembered from Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#135

Post by Helianthus16 »

JonnieCache wrote: post #125
rbanffy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than because of a seriously fubared justice system? I live in Brazil and I had two cars stolen. None was found, nobody was charged. A couple years back I had my backpack (with my laptop inside) robbed at gunpoint. A friend of mine who lives in the US had his car stolen. It was returned that same afternoon. Another friend of mine had his home completely cleaned up (the thieves left the heavy furniture and the…

I hope one day not to have to say this in one of these debates: Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. At all. Not only is it invalid reasoning but it taints the rest of the debate because it often sounds so convincing, going hand in hand as it usually does with appeals to emotion. This applies doubly when discussing macro-level societal issues like the justice system.

However, anecdotal evidence can point to a line of inquiry that might uncover important statistical evidence. It presents categories: "Crimes not addressed" as a cause of low incarceration.

Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend.

Anecdotal evidence _is_ evidence. It is just not strong statistical evidence.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#136

Post by JimmyL »

Raphael wrote: post #108
JimmyL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, there are some district courts/jurisdictions that are turning against bail bondsmen for being exploitative. Some will try and outright ban them from operating (either by explicit local ordinance, or by denying them the agreements on standing credit and prisoner transfer that they need to operate), but more interesting are the courts that try and eliminate them via competition. As of now, bail bondsmen…

That sounds like you just lowered the bail, in which case the defendant would probably just pay $1K for someone to borrow the $10K. How can credit and cash be distinguished anyway?

Bondsmen don't generally put up the cash directly for a bond, instead they have a standing deal with the courts they work that guarantees that they will pay if someone skips bail (which is backed by the local line-of-credit; I should have been clearer about that).

Thus, it's pretty clear who's paying for the bond. If someone walks in with a bunch of cash or a cheque then they're probably doing it themselves (or they've committed some other crime by getting money from an unlicensed lender), if a bond agent walks in and says "he's with us", then it's with them.

On paper, it's lowering the bail. In practice, the amount the person is paying has stayed the same, as have the incentives.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#137

Post by jdminhbg »

jchrisa wrote: post #133
philwelch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to make it look like that when you ignore leading and lagging indicators. Someone might be in prison today because of a crime they committed in 1990. Obviously, their being in prison has nothing to do with the 2010 crime rate and a little bit to do with the 1990 crime rate. In 1990, the US did have higher criminality! My point, though, was that it's not a controlled experiment to compare the US and the Neth…

I'd suggest that our living arrangement (get isolated from community, earn and spend money to purchase a simulacrum of what community used to provide) has a lot to do with the bleakness of American life, and bleakness is probably a bigger predictor of criminality than anything else. If you want to fix the US, go back 60 years and fight highway and auto subsidies.

Given that crime rates are vastly higher in walkable urban settings than sprawling suburbs, I'd suggest that highway subsidies are a poor indicator of crime rates.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#139

Post by philwelch »

neilk wrote: post #98
philwelch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be accusing me of racism rather than offering a counterargument. Did I misread you? Cultural homogeneity and its effects on crime transcend race. European immigration to the US during the 19th and 20th centuries were linked to crime as well. Usually, the dominant cultures in a heterogenous society will exclude and oppress minority populations, which leads to poverty and desperation. The problem really is…

That link seems suspect to me. India is rife with crime. Daily life , even for rich people, involves lots of activities that would be crimes in a Western country, particularly official corruption. Anyway, you spoke in terms of "criminality in some American cultures", which sounds like a euphemism, since you neglected to name them. Although you followed it up with your hetereogenity thesis I (like many readers) was al…

America's slave-descended population have been in the country for over 500 years. By any normal expectations, their original culture should have been completely blended with the mainstream culture hundreds of years ago. And a large extent this is true of those blacks that enter the middle class and beyond. But for those that are trapped in a ghetto lifestyle -- with ghetto attitudes -- I don't think you can attribute that up to cultural differences. That's circular reasoning again. Something else is keeping the cultures separate.

It sounds like we're violently agreeing here. What I refer to as "cultural differences" or "cultural heterogenity" is the result of this process, not the cause. As long as blacks have been materially excluded from the middle class in America, America as a whole has been trapped with these cultural differences.

In any case, heterogenity doesn't always lead to a higher crime rate. Toronto is over 38% immigrant [1] and yet has a low crime rate. Montreal has been riven by cultural heterogenity (between English, French, and others) ever since the 1700s, and yet has an even lower crime rate.

That's a fair point. Canada probably does a better job than the US of handling those issues. French Canadian culture is an interesting difference we don't really have in America--French Canadians (unless I'm mistaken) are no more or less affluent than English Canadians and, aside from various controversies over Quebec separatism, by and large don't seem to be materially oppressed. Those aren't things you can say about, for instance, America's Spanish-speaking population.

American culture accepted and integrated generations of European immigrants, but those immigrants largely assimilated (or rather, their children did) due to geographic isolation from the countries they immigrated from. That geographic isolation doesn't exist for Latin American immigrants, and it's quite possible they will remain a different culture in perpetuity. America is going to have to learn how to accept that diversity rather than expecting assimilation. As you may have gathered, we're not doing a great job of that so far.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#140

Post by rhizome »

Alex3917 wrote: post #107
zeemonkee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a pretty serious opportunity, if you get to build/run prisons for a living. Given how corrupt US politics is, I'm sure the two are connected.

"Given how corrupt US politics is, I'm sure the two are connected." Prisons get to extend the sentences of inmates if they test positive for drugs while in prison. Guess whether it's public or private prisons where inmates are on average 8 times more likely to test positive for drug use. http://www.bop.gov/news/research_projects/published_reports/...

There's perverse incentive for them to allow drugs into their prisons if they benefit when inmates fail drug tests.
Post reply on HN